Dropbox bringing Mailbox email client to the Mac

Amid a slew of announcements today, Dropbox dropped one that’ll be of particular interest to Mac users: Mailbox, the acclaimed email client for iOS, is coming to the Mac. Mailbox for OS X is in public beta now; you can sign up at the Mailbox website.

The public beta isn’t surprising: it’s reminiscent of the way the developer originally rolled out the iOS version in early 2013. Then, you’d download the app, but you had to get on a waiting list to actually use it. (That waiting list went away a couple of months later.)

Once we got the iOS version, we really liked it, because of the way it made processing email quicker and easier than Apple’s own Mail app for iOS. Its key feature: it’s extremely swipe-centric. You can swipe right to archive a message, or further right to delete it; you swipe left to delay the message –in essence, having it disappear for now and reappear later – or swipe further left to add the message to a list. It’ll be interesting to see if and how that interface is implemented on the Mac – once we get our hands on it.

As I say, Mailbox for Mac was just one of a bunch of announcements Dropbox made. The company also announced Dropbox for Business, an Android version of Mailbox, a new ‘Auto-swipe’ feature for Mailbox (on Android first, but coming to iOS soon), a photo and video manager app called Carousel and Project Harmony, which brings Dropbox-powered collaboration to Microsoft Office.